


to remind yourself

by Lunaurelle



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Eiselcross arc spoilers, Gen, Grief, Speculation, spoilers through 117
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27850478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunaurelle/pseuds/Lunaurelle
Summary: “You kept the clover,” Cree says.“I did.” Lucien shakes his head, but his gut twists, and the end of his tail flicks up snow.He kept the letter, too.--on grieving, and Mollymauk
Relationships: Caleb Widogast & Yasha, Cree & Lucien (Critical Role), Mollymauk Tealeaf & Yasha
Comments: 10
Kudos: 99





	to remind yourself

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers through episode 117.

_My name is Caleb Widogast. You are Mollymauk Tealeaf. I am so sorry this happened to you._

_I do not know what information you will need right now. You are a member of the Mighty Nein. You are our friend. Those are the most important things. The rest would be better in person. If you find us, we will help you. Go to Zadash, to the Evening Nip, and ask for the Gentleman. He can tell you how to find us. We have unfinished business that carried us far away, and I am sorry we cannot be here with you. Be careful, Mollymauk, please. We want to see you again._

_Sincerely,_

_Caleb Widogast, Nott the Brave, Jester Lavorre, Fjord, Beauregard, and Yasha, of the Mighty Nein._

* * *

The scry shreds in the wind, and Lucien watches the space near Cree’s shoulder where it was. Snow flecks into the dark shimmer of Cree’s fur. The fire melts some of it, but she’s going to be salt and pepper before the end of the storm. Not once has she complained of cold while they’ve journeyed Eiselcross over the course of days Lucien hasn’t counted closely, but her dark nose is chapped with wind even though she ducks into her scarf at every opportunity. The weather is a whip at their backs, its relentless push onwards more compelling than the natural pursuit of their goal. Even with both harrying them, the Tombtakers must rest when night throws its stormy tantrum.

Their fire burns without the crack and smoke of branches. Magic should be hotter than kindling, but it’s less comforting. Night this far north is unfairly cold and unfairly dark, and though they took their spoils and another step forward, Lucien doesn’t feel victorious. Judging by the slow, cautious way his Tombtakers return to conversation, no one speaking louder than the whip and flicker of flame, he’s not the only one. Following the wisp of an ember, he catches Cree’s eyes.

“They really bother you, don’t they?” Lucien says. Even if he didn’t know her as well as he does, the threads of her mind against his leave residue. The scrying from the tiefling lady is a hand rubbed backwards up Cree’s fur.

Cree says, “I don’t want them interfering with us.”

“They might try.” Lucien shrugs, and the fur hood of his cloak rustles with the toss of his shoulder. His breath nearly freezes to the roof of his mouth when he speaks, sticking like the Mighty Nein’s attention.

They watch and watch, but they balk when they’re face to face with him. A memory can be such a powerful thing, and theirs is paralyzing them. It’s part of what made them a little charming. Only a little, because that was a lot of pain on a lot of faces the longer they spoke with him. The knowledge that a splintered little scrap of himself went off and won loyalties that he doesn’t get to keep is like the burn after a long drink. On that, he and Cree seem to be in agreement, but there’s a wedge between them he doesn’t remember. He’s been willing to chalk it up to temporary death, until today.

Cree’s brow stays furrowed and her mouth stays shut, making it likely she’s thinking more than she’s saying. She’s kept her knowledge of the Mighty Nein close and quiet, like Lucien might slip away again if she says too much. When it comes to his missing time, Cree works hard to keep everything seamless. He wouldn’t mind so much if it felt less like she was keeping things from him. 

“Cree?” Lucien says to prompt her. He pulls her name long, watching the way it puffs into the cold, coaxing his tone warmer than the fire.

Cree takes a calculated pause. Then she stands, the wind howling through the gap she’s left, and comes to his side. The flame lurches after her and can’t reach. Lucien dusts off a place beside him as if he’ll actually find the solid ground beneath the snow. Cree settles into the divot and leans towards him.

“You kept the clover,” she says.

“I did.” Lucien shakes his head, but his gut twists, and the end of his tail flicks up snow.

He kept the letter, too. The way Cree spoke about the group—well, he’d thought they were supposed to be acquaintances. Acquaintances don’t give you mementos and leave instructions and well-wishes on your dead body. They don’t tell you they cared about you. He doesn’t recall them offering any of their names, not any kind of introduction, and yet, the woman with the roiling cloud of black and white hair said he was her friend, same as Caleb Widogast wrote in the letter. Lucien knows the kinds of friends he makes and knows that’s not such a light thing, if it’s really true. The pressed-flat clover tucked in the fold of Caleb’s letter is all the evidence Lucien needs. It leaves him feeling uneasy, not unlike when he woke up again, which is a frankly disturbing notion. Cree would say it’s just his soul coming back together, that of course he’s going to feel a little bit wrong after that, and he more or less believes her.

Lucien remembers the tall fellow in pinks and turquoise and how he’d asked, kind as day, if Cree had put him together with all the pieces. She never volunteers information about his fragment. Cree couldn’t well hide the fact it had done more than just live and die again once Lucien got in front of a mirror. Lucien flattens his hand along the side of his neck; energy hums from his palm to the coordinating eye there, but he swears he feels the silk of the peacock feathers instead.

“Do you think they would try to take their friend back? Could they?” Lucien says, and he sounds contemplative instead of afraid. “You know, I doubt they would have so much as scratched me, looking at their faces.”

The sound Cree makes is not a happy one. Her fur puffs up. When her hand lands on his arm he feels the tips of her claws through his clothes. She says through the snap of her teeth, “I don’t want to take chances on you.”

When she’d pulled him out of the ground, there’d been a gaudy coat flapping above his head as a grave marker. She’d told him to leave it.

Lucien doesn’t know how a soul heals, if it takes months like bones and leaves bumps where the breaks were. Maybe it’s like ice, and no matter how smashed up it is, it can be melted down and frozen together again no matter how they’ve changed in the meantime. There are few things that are hurt deeply that heal quickly; those sorts of things are primed to be broken again.

“They seemed to know you,” Lucien says. And on this, Lucien presses, because he may not give a damn about whoever held onto his body for him, but the Mighty Nein do, ad nauseum.

“We met once,” Cree says. “Then they came back without you.”

“It wasn’t me,” Lucien points out.

It should be an easy claim, but it becomes awful since it looked like him, pretended to be him, and strung Cree along for the ride. That’s a very personal kind of pain his intruder caused.

Cree goes silent. Her hand pulls slowly away from him, fibers of his cloak snagging briefly. Lucien supposes nothing more will come from needling her, and he feels colder from that than the wind, in a way the fire will never reach, the feeling sluiced through his chest, getting in through the awful, gruesome scar on his chest, left for him to find just like the ivy crawl of tattoos from wrist to neck and down his back.

Lucien wants to believe he’s as whole as Cree says, but the scars ache fresh.

* * *

By the time Molly and Yasha step back into the sunlight, there’s little sunlight left. Dusk paves the dirt road ruddy orange-red as Molly stretches his arms above his head. His shadow makes it all the way to the other side of the street. He watches it jitter when he winces, his newly-tattooed shoulder and neck crinkling with pain like a sunburn. Funny, that he feels all crisp when he spent the whole day inside. Something about that makes him laugh, briefly, and Yasha looks over in that steady manner of hers. Twilight cuts sharp every curve of muscle wrapping her from back to shoulder to arm. She’d look incredible with thick lines of ink along some of those planes, but she said she was happy just holding his coat and watching. That’s just as well, that she’s minding it for him. Molly doesn’t think he can wear it for at least a day or two, with how the simple billow of his linen shirt aches and pricks. The nicks from his swords don’t sting long when he calls on them for battle, and he hopes this will be much the same.

“I’m kind of impressed,” Yasha says, as if his laugh had been the start of a conversation.

“Oh? Well, thank you.”

“Yeah.” Yasha turns to him, having to tip her head down a little over her shoulder. “I thought you were gonna pass out, like, three times, but you didn’t.”

“Yasha!”

“I’m just saying. You looked pale for a while.”

“Ye of little faith,” Molly says. He places a hand over his heart with a flare to his fingers, the slivers of precise scars pressing little ridges into his fingertips. He clutches at the collar of his loose shirt for several more steps, Yasha shaking her head once before he laughs quietly and shakes off the act. A stone that’s weathered the whole ocean, his Yasha. She doesn’t fall for his acts when she shouldn’t, and she’s never seemed to get fed up with him, either. It’s a hard balance to find in a person.

“What does it feel like?” Yasha says as they walk.

“It’s not so bad. Nothing worse than my own handiwork.” Molly just stops from feeling along his temple where the ends of the feathers flick. The ink is still settling, the ache little more than the rush of water in the background of his mind. As they pass a shop with large windows at the front, he angles his neck. He wants to look at it again.

“No, I mean”—Yasha drifts behind him, her reflection more than a head taller than his. She transfers his jacket to drape over one arm and gestures with the other, and the fabric is so bold against her skin—“do you feel better, now that you have it?”

And with that, Molly knows precisely what she means. Yasha has this way about her, blunt but grown from a gentle place. It’s exactly how she handles the flowers in her book. Molly wishes she didn’t have so much insight into him, but she’s known him as long as he’s known himself. It’s probably hard to forget how he was at first, for anyone other than him. Empty, and working on not being that way. Does he feel fuller, now? Is the scarlet eye on the side of his neck more bearable now that it’s set into something pretty? Is he going to have sweeter dreams?

Molly doesn’t have answers to anything like that. All he knows is that the fading trill from the inked needle makes him smile again. He squints at his tattoo in the reflection of the glass. It makes him happy to choose. “Just wonderful,” he says.

“Really?”

“Absolutely.” Molly peels himself away and starts walking again, backwards this time. “Better every day. This was a good idea, Yasha.”

“It was your idea,” Yasha says, but he knows how to look for the smile in her voice when her face doesn’t show it. You have to look very, very close, but Molly’s good at that. He waits for her to catch up to him, then curls his arm through hers where she’s draped the coat.

Their conversation fades with the sunlight, Molly watching the horizon grow bluer and bluer until he can’t make it out anymore, letting Yasha tug him in the right direction. She’s reliable like that, for how often she goes off on her own. When she’s with you, she’s with you.

“This was nice,” Molly says. “You should come with me for the next one.”

“You want to get more?"

“I have plenty of space.” And one more obvious red eye on his hand. He absolutely does not want to know why it’s there, why ink sloughs away from it like it’s pigmented deeper than his own skin. He doesn’t mind a statement piece, but these make him feel twisty and sick. He doesn’t know a thing about his predecessor except that they must have made some exceptionally bad decisions, to have left nothing behind but a lingering sense of wrongness that Molly wants to toss off the side of the circus cart and trample. Molly doesn’t want to be like that. He’ll fill himself full of his new life until all he knows are his own choices. That’s all he needs.

* * *

Mollymauk is in Caleb’s tower down to the blueprints, and that’s the only reason Yasha can find to explain why she’s lingered in the sitting room long after everyone else has drifted out of reach to their rooms. Above Yasha stretch the stained glass panels and their faint glow, as if perpetual sunset outside of the tower filters through them. They cast a riot of color on her arms and across the open pages of her book, marbleizing the faint imprint where the four-leaf clover had been. 

Yasha cannot help but think back to the first time they met Cree, and how afterwards the group pulled the truth out of Molly with ruthless curiosity. She would have killed them for it, if he’d asked. It was before she liked or knew any of them, but Molly always was more generous than anyone deserved. Most of what Molly told them, Yasha knew already. It is what Molly said in the aftermath that plays in her head now: _Joy can fill a lot in a person’s life._

“That was stupid,” Yasha says. Her rage burns lower than it used to, but for a moment, she feels it writhe through her chest like an animal, desperately caged. She knows the Storm Lord keeps her in the eye of his hurricane, but sometimes she stands too close to the edges. She tangles her hand in braids until she finds the loose hair at the base of her neck and anchors there. The way she feels angry and out of place is familiar, but there is no Obann to fight, and she must live with this herself. Maybe she never fell back into place, just got used to the gaps until Lucien stood before her and reminded her of open spaces that cannot be covered.

“I do not think so,” Caleb says, and Yasha looks up sharply. Her hand lands on top of her book as if to protect the afterimage of the clover. Caleb is drifting down from the center of the tower, his hair settling gently around his shoulders as his feet tap-tap onto the floor. He hesitates in the central chamber as if he is a stranger in his own library. Caleb looks as if he is coming out of a trance. Yasha knows Caleb is a roiling whirlpool of thoughts, good and bad, and judging by the circles beneath his eyes, he has been entertaining the latter.

“Sorry,” he says. “I did not mean to disturb you.”

Speaking of these losses, distant or near, is harder than even writing a letter to Beau. For a moment, Yasha wishes she could ask Caleb to wait while she pulls out her pen. She thinks he would honor that. But something might be lost that way, so Yasha tries not to hang in her deliberation.

“I thought you went to bed,” Yasha says.

“I went upstairs,” Caleb says. He trips over the word _stairs_ , then makes a little gesture with his hand, like he’s lifting something. “Up…up. You know. Would you prefer to be alone?”

Yasha takes a breath in and sighs through her nose, finding no easy answer. “I thought I might, but maybe not.”

Caleb’s brow draws together in that way that means empathy rather than worry, but his mouth curves down. He brings his palms together in thought, fingers pressing into a line as he enters the room and sits cross-legged on the other side of her book, half-illuminated by the hearth like she is. Caleb looks like he was made to bathe in the fire, its color flecking copper and gold through his hair, making the freckles high on his cheeks reflect like little bits of glitter.

With his right hand, Caleb points to the empty page, his finger landing on the edge of a petal. He does not speak, but he studies the outline like any other of his books, like there is a glyph and code and spell to understand if he spends enough time getting to know it.

Caleb looks up at her slowly. “I know you want your friend back,” he says. “I do not know if there is anything left of him to make this possible.”

“Or if we should even try. If we could even do anything.” Yasha nods along. It’s easier than saying she misses Molly. She knows how this works. She has known. She has been given this lesson before, though Caleb is the kindest teacher of it so far. Magic can do incredible things. It can turn Nott into Veth, resurrect a life in a way Yasha is almost jealous of, but there are always limits.

Caleb considers her for a long moment. “Why did you give that clover to Lucien?”

“That’s what you do, when someone dies,” Yasha says, after a false start and a few words that don’t fit right in her mouth.

“For Mollymauk?”

“No. For myself.”

“Ah.” Understanding clears Caleb’s eyes. “Then it is not stupid.”

Sometimes Yasha wishes she could accept logic as easily as Caleb does. She tries to believe him. To give herself this one, small reprieve. It does not stick easily. Part of her wants to ask if he would do what he did for Nott, if he could make something impossible happen with enough research and ritual. Yasha wears something miraculous on her back, and yet, this still seems too much to ask for. Would it hurt Molly, to bring him back? What if they try and all he becomes is _empty_ and nothing more?

She does not want to put herself in shackles over this. She looks up. It is clear to her Caleb has found a way to live with the loss. Can she also?

Yasha flips several pages until she gets to the torn edge near the middle-back. The imprints on the page behind it still hold the detritus of her letter to Beau. Maybe that is the shape of joy she should be looking for.

“Caleb?” Yasha says. “I know you bought a shit ton of paper the last time we were in town. Did you already use it all?”

“I still have some,” Caleb says, eyeing the jagged space like an empty tooth in her book. “It looks like you could use a little extra, hm?”

“If you don’t mind,” Yasha says.

Caleb nods and reaches into his coat for one of his books. From it he pulls several loose leaves of paper, which he begins to thumb through and count quietly— _eins...zwei…drei…vier_ —until he taps several of them together and hands them to her. It’s smooth and new with crisp edges, heavier than she’s used to.

“I will put it to good use,” Yasha says. “Thank you.”

“ _Ja,_ of course.” Caleb gazes briefly into the fire before his gaze follows the path Yasha’s did, up the geometry of the stained glass. When he returns to her, he claps a hand on her shoulder and stands up. His hand is warm, and rough with scars that better suit someone like her. 

“I will leave you to it,” he says, “from one introvert to another.”

Caleb goes up-up and Yasha watches until the edges of his coat and boots disappear from view. Yasha folds her arms across her chest and curves her back, stretching the tension in her back and knowing it will never really leave her. All the same, she shakes her arms out like there’s hope and takes her pen from the center of her journal.

 _Dear Beau. Dear Caleb. Dear Molly. To Lucien._ She thinks through all of them, breathes until she finds the peace in the center of her storm, and makes the first mark.

**Author's Note:**

> There were several little lines in 117 that stuck out to me, so I pulled them all into a reflective narrative together. I figured I’d get this up now, before 118 starts proving me wrong. Thanks for reading <3


End file.
